Sime Darby Plantation Liberia Case Study

On 23 July 2009, Sime Daby Berhad had successfully renewed the contract with the Government of Liberia. In the new contract, Liberia’s government agreed to lease their 222,000 hectares of land for 63 years to Sime Darby plantation Liberia (SDPL) for the purpose of growing palm trees and rubber plantation in order to reduce Liberia’s foreign debt. The contract contains terms and conditions such as there are only four counties will involve in this development projects which are Grand Cape Mount, Bomi, Bong, and Gbarpolu (Appendix 1), Sime Daby will pay $5 U.S. dollar per hectare of land to Liberia’s government every year and the company will also provide not less than 30,000 jobs to Liberians. The first plantation projects finally started in

Report showed that the dispute occurred because of lacking of consultation on the plantation projects. Inadequate compensation, fewer jobs offered, failure to protect community interest and failure to implementing free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) are also the reasons why the dispute occurred between Sime Darby and community (The guardian, 2012).
Sime Darby Plantation Liberia (SDPL) had taken over the land without complied with the policy which is free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). According to the CICR report, most of the indigenous community in Grand Cape Mount did not know their land has been leased to Sime Darby until they saw the bulldozers were working on their land. This means their land has been grabbed without the consent. However, Sime Darby denied it. The company said they would not be there if the operation did not get approval from the community (The guardian,

Therefore, the lack of land and food aroused much fear in the Indigenous community. Because there was no harvest, the community is forced to buy their food in the marketplace by using their poorly paid. Sime Darby said the company will pay a large sum of money to the community for their land. However, community argued that the compensation fail to cover their lost. The compensation paid for land by the Sime Darby was too little. A resident in Grand Cape mount, Mr Blasuah, said that he only received $130 U.S dollar for his peppers, eggplants and cassava farm. Although he employed by Sime Darby to work as a contractor but the total salary is only $500 a month, less than what he received from his farm (Geoffrey York, 2012).
In the agreement, Sime Darby promised that they will provide approximately 30,000 jobs to community. But in a village in Grand Cape Mount County, only 13 residents employed by Sime Darby. Other residents have no job and income. Even if the residents got the jobs, some of them were fired because protestation against the company. The schools in the village ended up closing because the community did not have enough money to hire teacher (Geoffrey York,